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If you decided to blow off a Zoom meeting by sending an AI dummy instead, you might find yourself out of a job. But when a head honcho does it, it’s a masterfully executed stunt, a sign of a business genius who’s got his finger on the pulse.
Take Sam Sidhu, the CEO of Customers Bank. During a conference call discussing the company’s latest earnings reports, he waited nearly an hour before revealing that it was actually an AI that had been speaking all along, CNBC reports — which, to be honest, feels like a huge waste of everyone’s time.
“The prepared remarks you heard on my behalf today were delivered by my AI clone, not read by me,” Sidhu said, bragging that it was a potential first for a public company earnings call. (Whether anyone was actually fooled is unclear.)
As it turns out, Customers Bank recently signed a multiyear partnership with OpenAI to deploy its AI models across the bank, as well as collaborate to create custom AI capabilities tailored to its banking operations, it announced Monday. Sidhu’s suspiciously handsome AI clone was intended to draw attention to the new collab, as well as unintentionally to his own vanity.
Sidhu is expecting the AI to have an absolutely incredible impact, telling CNBC he projects AI will improve the company’s efficiency ratio — which is calculated by dividing a company’s non-interest operating costs by revenue — from 49 percent to the low 40s. As OpenAI’s AI agents are rolled out across the bank over the next six to twelve months, he expects the time it takes to close a commercial loan to go down from upwards of 30 days to just seven. And opening accounts for commercial clients, which typically can take over a day, will be completed in just twenty minutes.
“When you have an autonomous agent, you’re essentially creating a digital worker… and they can work around the clock,” Sidhu told CNBC.
These are bold predictions, given that AI agents remain error prone and have caused numerous incidents at major corporations that have embraced them, including Amazon and Meta.
But AI fever has long taken hold in the c-suite, and Sidhu is far from the first CEO to create an AI simulacrum of themselves. Chief among them is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is reportedly building a CEO AI agent to help him do do his job — on top of becoming omnipresent by building a “photorealistic” AI clone that staff can turn to for advice at any time.
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